Comments from Israel, covering everything that you can imagine and more!

Sunday, May 12, 2013

Trip to Portugal

This was an AACI-sponsored trip to Portugal to visit places of Jewish heritage, with the AACI representative Miriam Green (our daughter). The first day on the trip to Portugal was exhausting. We flew overnight with a stop-over in Brussels, since there is no direct flight from Israel to Lisbon. In the early morning we took a coach tour of Brussels and we saw some of the many grandiose buildings that King Leopold II had built. He had a huge personal fortune because he personally owned the Belgian Congo in Africa, and exploited the natives to produce rubber (for details see "King Leopold's Ghost" by Adam Hochschild). Then we hopped back aboard a plane and flew 2.5 hrs to Lisbon.

Our intrepid guide Michael Tuchfeld met us at the airport and we went off in our shiny coach. We had a tour of Lisbon with our Portuguese guide and it is very beautiful, quite hilly and varied. Although Lisbon had been settled by the Romans, who called it Lusitania, most of Lisbon was destroyed by an earthquake and tsunami in 1775, so very little remains that is earlier. We saw the medieval monument called the Belem Tower (Belem is derived from Bethlehem) and the relatively modern monument to the Portuguese discoveries of the world (from Brazil to Japan).We went to the district of Alfama that used to include a Jewish quarter and we saw the street still called the Juderia. There had been three Jewish quarters in Lisbon but nothing remains.

After the expulsion of the Jews from Spain in 1492, about one third of those who left went to Portugal. After King Manual I ascended to the throne he decided to keep the Jews but get rid of their Jewish identity, so he forbade the practise of Judaism and had the Jews forcibly converted, but he gave them a grace period of 20 years during which they would not be investigated.In 1496 he wished his son to marry the daughter of the Catholic King of Spain, but they made a requirement that all Jews be expelled from Portugal.Even though he issued an edict of expulsion, instead he forcibly converted those who remained practising Jews.However, in 1506 there was a massacre of Jews in Russio Square in Lisbon, about 2,500 were murdered in the square outside one of the main Churches. According to the history books, King Manuel did not intend this to happen so he arrested the perpetrators. We went to see the memorial stone with a Magen David carved into it that commemorates the massacre and nearby an inscribed apology from the Church.

While we were there, Michael told us that we were not ordinary tourists, like Japanese or Italians, but as Jews we had a particular connection to that spot and that history. While we were gathered around this memorial some passers-by stopped to hear what was being said. One man afterwards spoke to us and told us that his father had been Jewish but his mother was Catholic and although he was brought up Christian he thought of himself as partly Jewish and he said he liked Israel and said "shalom" to us when he left. This was a very nice gesture.

On several occasions we were told that there is no anti-Semitism in Portugal.There are no anti-Semitic parties like in Hungary or Greece and there are no groups of fascist thugs as there are in Britain and Germany. Indeed estimates of the proportion of Portuguese with Jewish antecedents vary from 20% to 50%.We then climbed back aboard the bus and went to the venue where the Jewish community had arranged kosher meals for us during our stay in Lisbon and then finally after eating to the hotel Altis and a much needed rest.